He has alienated many with outrageous comments and irrational behavior, yet remains wildly popular. He is an antidrug crusader, yet has struggled with drug abuse himself. And he grew up a child of privilege, the son of a provincial governor, yet was subjected to regular beatings.

His mother whipped him so often for his misbehavior that she wore out her horsewhip, according to his brother, Emmanuel Duterte. At parochial school, he was caned by Jesuit priests and, the president says, molested by one. By his teenage years, he was known as a street brawler.

“Violence in the house, violence in the school and violence in the neighborhood,” Emmanuel Duterte said. “That is why he is always angry. Because if you have pain when you are young, you are angry all the time.”

Years later, a psychological assessment of Mr. Duterte, prepared in 1998 for the annulment of his marriage, concluded that he had “narcissistic personality disorder” and a “pervasive tendency to demean, humiliate others and violate their rights.”

Nonetheless, his ailing ex-wife campaigned for his presidential bid last year.

That act of devotion only begins to unravel the paradox that is Mr. Duterte. Behind his brutish caricature, according to interviews with dozens of Mr. Duterte’s friends, family members, allies and critics, is a man who can be charming and engaging. He has many loyal friends and a soft spot for sick children.

As mayor of Davao City, he was known to help people in need by digging into his pocket and handing them a wad of cash. To many, his vulgar jokes only burnish his bona fides as a man of the people. When he appears in public, he is swarmed by adoring fans.

Still, the bodies have been piling up. Since Mr. Duterte took office last June and declared a “war” on drugs, the police and unknown assassins have killed more than 3,600 people, the police say, mostly in the slums of Philippine cities. Some put the toll at more than 7,000.

A man suspected of dealing drugs shot dead after a “buy and bust” operation in Quezon City in September. Credit Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

 

“I might go down in the history as the butcher,” he acknowledged unapologetically in January.

In less than nine months, he has already surpassed the death toll of President Ferdinand Marcos, whose forces killed about 3,300 political opponents and activists during his harsh 20-year rule.

Yet his gangland approach to combating crime and drugs has largely endeared him to Filipinos who have suffered high rates of violent crime and who see him as a refreshing change from the sophisticated but out-of-touch elite who have ruled this country for most of the last three decades.

The dissonance between the image of the gentle, caring grandfather and the brutal strongman spilling blood on the streets is just one of many in a common-man president who was born to the elite and has lived a life surrounded by violence.

Rodrigo Duterte, right, in headband and glasses, then the vice mayor of Davao City, and Mayor Zafiro Respicio, center, meeting with feuding Bagobo tribes in 1987. Credit Renato Lumawag/Reuters

Young, Armed and Angry

Rodrigo Roa Duterte grew up in war-torn Davao City, in the southern Philippines, the oldest son of the governor of Davao Province.

As a teenager, he hung out with the toughest kids, got into fights and learned the rude expressions he uses today. By 15, he was carrying a gun, his brother said.

As a freshman at the Ateneo de Davao high school, he was fondled by an American priest, an experience he revealed only in 2015. He identified the priest as the Rev. Mark Falvey, who later moved to California and died in 1975. The Jesuit order agreed in 2007 to pay $16 million to nine people Father Falvey molested as children at a Hollywood church.

Mr. Duterte retaliated against another priest who had punished him by filling a squirt gun with ink and spraying the priest’s white cassock, his siblings said. For that, he was expelled. He often skipped classes and likes to tell audiences that it took him seven years to finish high school.

His misbehavior was often overlooked because of his status, family members say. “He was known as the governor’s son,” said his older sister, Eleanor Duterte.

A daredevil, he took flying lessons at 16. On his first solo flight, he buzzed the family home and hit a treetop with the wheel of his Piper Cub, Emmanuel Duterte said. Later, a car accident put him in a coma for two days, his sister Jocellyn Duterte said.

The first time he killed a man, he says, was in a drunken beach brawl at age 17. “Maybe I stabbed somebody to death,” he told an interviewer two years ago.

His reputation as a womanizer is well founded, but it was often women who sought him out. “Being the governor’s son,” Jocellyn Duterte said, “the women were always available.”

His father told him that since he was always in trouble, he could save legal fees by becoming a lawyer, his brother recalled, so Rodrigo went to law school. In his final year, he shot and wounded a fellow student whom he accused of bullying him.

Mr. Duterte graduated anyway and became a prosecutor.

“One thing about my brother is he is hardheaded,” Emmanuel Duterte said. “The more you tell him not to do it, the more he will do it. He needs to tone down on his anger. He needs anger management.”

In the 1980s, his mother led frequent marches against President Marcos’s dictatorial rule. After his ouster, President Corazon Aquino offered her the post of Davao’s vice mayor. She asked that Rodrigo be appointed instead, friends and family said.

Two years later, in 1988, he ran for mayor and won, starting a lifelong streak in which he has never lost an election.

When he took office, much of Davao was a war zone. The iron rule of the Marcos era had ended, and Communist rebels held a large part of the city. Armed groups operated with impunity and assassinations of police officers were common.

Making the city safe was Mr. Duterte’s biggest challenge, and one he accepted personally.

Jesus G. Dureza, a high school friend who is now a cabinet-level adviser, recalls seeing him late one night in the taxi he often drove to patrol the city. Mr. Duterte said he was hunting for a man who had been robbing cabdrivers. Mr. Dureza noticed that his pistol was cocked.

“He had a death wish,” Mr. Dureza said.

Rodrigo Duterte inspecting the assault rifle of Ronald dela Rosa, far left, then a police senior inspector, in Davao City in 1997. Mr. dela Rosa later became Davao City police chief and, when Mr. Duterte became president last year, chief of the national police, where he oversees the antidrug campaign. Credit Renato Lumawag/Reuters

The Davao Death Squad

Shortly after he became mayor, crime suspects started turning up dead on Davao’s streets.

Mr. Duterte and his supporters have long denied the existence of a death squad in Davao City. But in September, Edgar Matobato, 57, came forward and told a Senate committee that he worked as an assassin on the squad for 24 years, killing about 50 people.

In an interview with The New York Times, he said the death squad was founded in 1988 at a lunch he attended at the old Menseng Hotel with Mr. Duterte, several police officers and six other recruits. They were told their job was to hunt down criminals.

A police officer passed around a covered basket, and each recruit took out a weapon. Mr. Matobato considered it good fortune that he drew a .45.

“The only one who could command the Davao Death Squad was Mayor Duterte,” he told The Times. “If there was an order to kill, it had to be with his clearance. Without his orders, we kill no one.”

Edgar Matobato, who says he was an assassin on the Davao Death Squad for 24 years, contends its orders came from Rodrigo Duterte, then the mayor of Davao.

Publish DateMarch 21, 2017. Photo by Jes Aznar for The New York Times. Watch in Times Video »

Mr. Duterte took part in at least one killing, Mr. Matobato said. In 2007, a chance encounter on the road with a man named Vicente Amisola led to a shootout.

After Mr. Amisola ran out of ammunition, Mr. Matobato said, Mr. Duterte arrived, grabbed an Uzi and emptied two magazines at the defenseless Mr. Amisola.

When they checked Mr. Amisola’s body, the squad discovered that he worked for the National Bureau of Investigation.

Arnold Rosales, the bureau’s acting regional director in Davao, said that Mr. Matobato’s account of Mr. Amisola’s killing matched the findings of the bureau’s investigation except for one detail: the allegation of Mr. Duterte’s involvement.

Investigators concluded that the death was a result of miscommunication, and no charges were filed, Mr. Rosales said. The investigative report is missing, he said.

In February, a former police officer, Arthur Lascañas, 56, came forward and confessed to having led the death squad. He said that he received orders to kill directly from Mr. Duterte and that he had killed 200 people.

“All the killings that we committed in Davao City, whether they were buried or thrown in the sea, were paid for by Mayor Duterte,” he said.

Of the more than 1,400 people the Davao Death Squad is believed to have killed, at least one was not a crime suspect. Jun Pala, a journalist and outspoken critic of Mr. Duterte’s, was gunned down near his home in 2003. Mr. Lascañas said the mayor ordered the killing, and that Mr. Lascañas helped carry it out.

Mr. Duterte has never directly addressed the accusations made by Mr. Matobato or Mr. Lascañas, and he declined to be interviewed for this article. After Mr. Matobato’s testimony, Mr. Duterte accused the senator who led the committee of taking payoffs from drug lords. She was arrested and jailed last month.

Mr. Duterte’s personal death toll is harder to substantiate. If he stabbed someone on the beach, there is no record of it. In boasting that he hunted down suspects by night, he offered no specifics.

His claim to have killed “about three people” probably refers to a 1988 hostage raid in which he says he fired an M-16 at three kidnappers. But he recently acknowledged, “I may have hit them all or none at all.”